I don't get why the majority of FJ seems to hate rage faces now. Those self-made comics with rage faces and those animal memes like courage/insanity wolf were the reason I enjoyed coming to FJ. Now it's just a bunch of pictures people get from other websites.

I'm pretty certain there was no "thumbs up". Either keep your arms at your sides or point your thumb down to show what you wanted, how could anyone possibly tell the difference between a thumbs up or down from a hundred meters away?

There was a thumbs up actually and Ceaser or whoever was in power at the time would let the crowd show what they wanted and then decide, they could choose to disobey what the crowd says but that would lead to a bad reputation. And it was actually very easy to see his thumb from the arena.

hahahahaha you guys get so anally traumatized when someone points out a massive, gaping hole the size of your assholes in your arguments. I don't care, though, because I'm right and you're wrong and no amount of fanny frustration on your part will change that.

If I remember correctly, most of the time they spared the losers life. They were kept like sports celebrities, and there was no sense in killing a good investment...now if the fight was one sided, and the loser wasn't worth the cost anymore, that's another story.

I remember being told there was some kind of historical controversy on how the Romans handled the deaths of gladiators, and what the "thumb up/ thumb down" meant, long before films like The Gladiator were out there and this was common knowledge of course.
They supposedly didn't really spare the loser's life very often, but I don't have much of a citable source to confirm.

The "thumb up/thumb down" historical controversy is because there's no proof that those were the gestures people did, we just know that there was one gesture or another that was done. The thumb thing is pretty much only widely accepted because of the painting OP captioned.